It would be awesome if we could use source control such as TFS directly in SSMS like we can in Visual Studio but at the moment we can’t for the reasons explained by Ken Van Hyning in this blog post. However he also explains how we can manually add some components that will give us the ability to use TFS with SSMS in the mean ...

Don’t be afraid of that title – I’m not talking about Six Sigma or anything super-formal here. In many organizations, there are more folks in other IT roles than in the Data Professional area. In other words, there are more developers, system administrators and so on than there are the “DBA” role.
That means we often have more to do than the ...

SQL Server has a few mechanisms to reach out to another server (even another server type) and query data from within a Transact-SQL statement. Among them are a set of stored credentials and information (called a Linked Server), a statement that uses a linked server called called OPENQUERY, another called OPENROWSET, and one called OPENDATASOURCE. ...

Saturday I volunteered at a work-day at our church. Our building is one of the first buildings built in this area of Washington, so it’s a beautiful old structure, which of course means there’s lots of maintenance.
I’m fairly decent with tools, I’ve done some woodworking in my day, and I’ve even rebuilt a car or two. But working on a structure ...

As the Data Professional in your organization, the rest of the org looks to you to ensure that the system can handle what the business requires. To do that, you need to know two things: what the business requires, and what SQL Server can do.
But of course there’s a bit more to it than that. Knowing the business side of the requirements – well, I ...

SQL Server contains many “Wizards. Wizards are simply programs that collect information based on user choices. The Wizard’s screens explain each step and the choices on that screen. Based on those answers collected from the user, the Wizard performs some task. What could possibly be wrong with helping a user this way? Well, plenty.
Wizards hide ...